Job 4

Eliphaz: The Innocent Prosper

¹ Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied:

² “If one ventures a word with you, will you be wearied? Yet who can keep from speaking?

³ Surely you have instructed many, and have strengthened their feeble hands.

⁴ Your words have steadied those who stumbled; you have braced the knees that were buckling.

⁵ But now trouble has come upon you, and you are weary. It strikes you, and you are dismayed.

⁶ Is your reverence not your confidence, and the uprightness of your ways your hope?

⁷ Consider now, I plead: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Or where have the upright been destroyed?

⁸ As I have observed, those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble reap the same.

⁹ By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of His anger they are consumed.

¹⁰ The lion may roar, and the fierce lion may growl, yet the teeth of the young lions are broken.

¹¹ The old lion perishes for lack of prey, and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.

¹² Now a word came to me secretly; my ears caught a whisper of it.

¹³ In disquieting visions in the night, when deep sleep falls on men,

¹⁴ fear and trembling came over me and made all my bones shudder.

¹⁵ Then a spirit ¹ glided past my face, and the hair on my body bristled.

¹⁶ It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance; a form loomed before my eyes, and I heard a whispering voice:

¹⁷ ‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God, or a man more pure than his Maker?

¹⁸ If God puts no trust in His servants, and He charges His angels with error,

¹⁹ how much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust, who can be crushed like a moth!

²⁰ They are smashed to pieces from dawn to dusk; unnoticed, they perish forever.

²¹ Are not their tent cords pulled up, so that they die without wisdom?’